Murderers Row

The gunning down of Patrick Lyoya in Grand Rapids, Michigan has reignited our national nightmare, the one from which too many Americans cannot wake up: Racism.

Having watched the video more times than I cared to, the twin conclusions are stark and simple. First, if the citizen had just allowed that totally incompetent boob of a cop to violate his rights, he might be alive today. Second, if said incompetent boob hadn't violated the citizen's rights, the citizen would certainly be alive today.

The debates have gone on for too long, even after a jury in Minnesota drew the line in the tragic George Floyd case. The police departments in America don't care about that. They're too busy exercising their power.

Power they do not deserve and should not have.

Since America has proven that it is thoroughly incapable of correcting that problem, preventative measures must be taken to protect non-whites from being brutalized and killed by the police. It should start with Public Service Announcements. They could go something like this:

America is a racist country. That fact is represented in our police departments. Not all officers are racist, but almost all policing policies inherently are. This routinely leads to the killings of citizens which may or may not be motivated by racism, but that nonetheless do occur regularly. While cooperating with the police is no guarantee, NOT cooperating fully with the police will likely lead to you being injured or killed.

Armed with that knowledge, non-whites can be somewhat protected from the blatantly false narrative pushed by our local, state and federal governments - that we're all equal. That's simply bullshit; thousands of traffic stops are made every day across this country and it seems like only non-whites get anything more than a ticket.

Everyone else winds up dead.

America needs to be up-front about its racist past and even more so about its racist present. Making such an honest disclosure would give minority communities the knowledge they need to increase their chances of surviving police encounters.

Go along with the program, let the police violate your rights, even if you have done nothing wrong. Otherwise, the police will kill you dead in the street. And we're sorry... But we aren't better than this.

- GG

Breyer Patch

In American politics, whenever something pops with the suddenness and scent of corn, it is usually a diversion. A decoy. A deliberately designed distraction. That may be what's afoot where the Joe Mansion Manchin debacle is concerned.

Manchin, the staunchly conservative Democratic Senator from West Virginia, is all the rage right now after he signaled - on Fox News of all places - that he will NOT vote for the president's ambitiously hefty Build Back Better plan. That kind of forked-tongue action draws a lot of light and heat... Which should make us squint into the cold, dark corners of the room to see what's really going on.

It is no secret that the sand is running out of the Democratic Party's hourglass. Typically, the Party in power will not fare well in the midterm elections, and we are only about 43 weeks away from that. It can already be assumed that the GOP will take over as the majority in the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives, as well.

The reasons for this don't matter at this point. Once the Republicans get the gavels back in their hands, they will not use power to help our struggling nation - no. They will instead use it to make life miserable for their perceived opposition. And to cement themselves into their seats in ways that amount to malfeasance if not worse.

How do we know that? We know that because Republican Senators have been asked what their intentions are if they take over the Senate where Supreme Court nominations may be concerned. They stated clearly, they will block any such nominations, the way they did with Merrick Garland's in 2015. They don't want to govern, they want to control, and any rapist will tell you that control is power (and that's what gets them off).

In order to keep some semblance of control on their own end, many Democrats are opining that octogenarian Justice Stephen Breyer should retire, giving Democrats the opportunity to nominate and confirm his replacement before November of 2022.

But, because they're Democrats, they don't want to do anything unseemly. Many have said that pushing Breyer to leave will only make him dig in and stay. People who think that way also think that we are as stupid as they are.

Breyer knows what people say. It does not come to him as any sort of shock or offense. But who among us would give up a job that pays $265,000 a year, whether you are any good at it or not? Precedent has been set for this scenario already. In 2013, Barack Obama tried to get Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down while Democrats had the ability to replace her.

Obviously, she did not, and then she died while Donald Trump was in office, allowing her right-wing replacement to be fast tracked by Mitch McConnell's Senate. Since Breyer refuses to care about the handwriting on the wall, that will very likely happen again.

Democrats have apparently lost their memories (if not their minds) about how to play the game of modern politics. Worse, they barely seem to notice that the other side has no interest in any kind of My-Fellow-Americanism.

Which brings us back to Senator Manchin. Perhaps being independently wealthy has numbed his soul to the needs of the many. Naked-faced greed obviously runs in his blood; you may or may not recall that the $600 EpiPen was the dark creation of his own daughter.

Whatever that says about him, the point is that he gave certain assurances to his fellow Democrats and to the president that he was on their team. And now he's not on their team. A good scolding from the White House Press Secretary is all the punishment he's going to receive for that.

Many voters will be left with no choice but to believe that the Democrats cannot even keep their own house in order; how are they supposed to run the country? Can't have that. Joe Biden needs to make such an example of Joe Manchin that nobody in his own party will ever model his slimy-treacherous behavior again.

The nation's Chief Executive only has so many tools in his belt. One of those tools happens to be the military. This is not to suggest that the military should be sent into West Virginia, but rather, that it should be sent out of it. Military bases used to get relocated all the time - and it almost always had something to do with the president getting something he wanted.

In this case, he could do it to get rid of something he doesn't want. Or someone. Because politics ain't beanbags... Remember?

GG

Fighting Words

"In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line." - George Carlin, Comedian

***

There's an old saying about singing, dancing and/or swimming: Those who can't, shouldn't try. It applies, clearly, to professional comedy as well.

American politics, at least so far as this century can tell, has reduced itself to a level not (or rarely) seen in our rather short history. We are literally bombing on the world stage.

See how that kinda doesn't work for me? If I tried to play the oboe, it would illicit the same response, because that's not my thing. But if want to tell you a story about Bobo the Hobo and the Oboe from Rio Lobo... See, that's my thing.

With the Trump presidency came the blaring amplification of political violence fueled by right-wing anger. Those embers on the fringe, which never fully cooled after the Civil War, were fanned by politicians who are frankly exploitative of hard feelings, and who are otherwise without many, if any, ideas.

Because that's their thing.

As a strategy, tapping into negative emotions of voters is cynical in the best light. Is it sufficient to win primary elections? Sure. Will it prevail in Congressional districts? Or statewide elections? In some states, reliably and predictably, the answer is yes. But not all.

The militarization of politics is nothing new, but it is something bad. The most overt purveyors of hostility, rather than civility, are on TV and the Internet all the time. They know who they are, and so do we.

In the grandest of Republican traditions, however, the war-talk has trickled down to the Party's lower branches. Like the toxin that it is, the ill-intentioned vitriol filters its way through the cellular membrane of the very social contract that built and sustained our country. Now this partisan belligerence pops up, like a parking lot carnival, at every other school board meeting.

Accordingly, paraphrasing Sergeant Rock has become a localized pastime, with linguistic potato mashers being hurled by even the lowest among the rank and file:

"We were in the middle of hand-to-hand combat trying to win and those resources could have helped here." said Bill Palatucci, described generously by CNN as a "national RNC committeeman" from New Jersey. He was griping about the $121,000 that the Republican National Committee gave to one of Donald Trump's legal firms while the Garden State's gubernatorial election was taking place.

By no means is this normalization of clarion calls for political violence confined to conservatives; they just happen to be better at it, that's all. Yet, look, and see Ari Berman, of old 'Mother Jones' fame, valiantly using Twitter to label GOP redistricting efforts in Georgia as "Total Asymmetric Warfare".

Hand to hand combat. Total asymmetric warfare. Delivered with a straight face - and appropriately so. It's not a joke, it isn't funny. We're not playing a game. We're playing with fire.

- GG

Move America

I think most Americans have a lot of respect for truck drivers. Not, like, pickup trucks. Big rigs. Eighteen-wheelers. Semi-tractor trailers.

We should also be grateful for the work they do. It's not just about motoring along in convoys and talking about Smokey on the CB radio. There's a lot of labor involved, a lot of experience and expertise required, a lot of administrative BS to do, all while being separated (in most cases) from their families while they are out on the road, earning their household income.

One other thing that can be said about truckers, who come in all shapes, sizes, colors, genders, religions and acronyms: There aren't enough of them.

We are starting to understand this. If we don't figure it out by paying attention to the news, it will occur to us when there aren't enough food items on the shelves at the grocery store, and the items that are there have been marked up considerably. (The old supply-and-demand pincer movement.)

Because there are not enough truckers, the clogging of America's ports has become deleterious to the public. To be sure, there are other problems that bedevil the supply side, but the big rigs and their highway pilots are the last link in the chain - and so are the most important.

But if Christmas comes and goes without the desired number (or type) of presents under the tree, America won't be looking for the MVP of a losing game. There will be more talk of, and investment in, self-driving electric trucks with robots to do all the heavy lifting. Just as concerns about the environment will drive the diesel engine out of business, electronic drone workers are preferred to flesh and blood ones.

Because a robot never gets sick. A robot never has to sleep, or eat, or use the restroom. A robot never needs health care or benefits. A robot never has something else on its mind. It never observes holidays. It never wants to spend time with Mrs. or Mr. Robot. Or play with its robot kids.

We can avoid all this. The government could, y'know, call in the military to alleviate the bottlenecks at the ports. The military has lots of trucks. And people who know how to drive them. They're a little more straight-laced than the private sector folks, sure, but they'd do in a pinch...

And that's what we're in. Yeah, they could do that. They could save America as we know it, before everything and everyone is replaced by drones, resulting in us being relegated to drone status ourselves. They could do that.

If they wanted to.

- GG

WWW

The Internet in America is the Wild West of cyberspace. It is here in the ether where we flex our free speech muscle, showing off our rippling, tanned public body for the rest of the world to admire - if they can see it over their Berlinesque firewalls.

Does that star-spangled banner yet wave?

GG

Iran and Ran and Ran...

Before we go attacking another Middle Eastern country, let's pause over the long relationship that U.S. presidents have had with Iran. In their own words, as recorded by the scribes and urls of history:

__________

"The American people have the greatest respect and admiration for the Iranian people. Your Kings from Cyrus and Darius are known among those famous monarchs who have advanced the cause of humanity." - Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1959

“I like [the Shah] I like him, and I like the country. And some of those other bastards out there I don’t like." - Richard Nixon, 1971

"As an indication of Iran's economic importance to the world scene, I am impressed that civilian, non-oil trade between the United States and Iran is expected to total over $20 billion by 1980." - Gerald R. Ford, 1975

"Iran is an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world." - Jimmy Carter, 1977

"I undertook the original Iran initiative in order to develop relations with those who might assume leadership in a post-Khomeini government." Ronald Reagan, 1987

"I sensed we were sending arms. And I sensed that we were trying to get hostages out, but not arms for hostages." - George H. W. Bush, 1988

“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger." - George W. Bush, 2002

"Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority." - Bill Clinton, 2005

"When you hear the inevitable critics of the deal sound off, ask them a simple question: do you really think that this verifiable deal, if fully implemented backed by the world's powers, is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East?" - Barack Obama, 2015

"If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!" - Donald Trump, 2019

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